Mobile communication devices are becoming increasingly popular for business and personal use due to a relatively recent increase in number of services and features that the devices and mobile infrastructures support. Handheld mobile communication devices, sometimes referred to as mobile stations, are essentially portable computers having wireless capability, and come in various forms. These include Personal Digital Assistants (PDA), cellular phones and smart phones. While their reduced size is an advantage to portability, bandwidth and processing constraints of such devices present challenges to the downloading and viewing of documents, such as word processing documents, tables and images.
Electronic documents are produced using various computer programs, such as word processors, spreadsheet programs, financial software, and presentation software. In addition to text, such documents contain structural and property information such as paragraph indentation, text color and table size, etc.
When a user of a mobile communication device wishes to view only selected portions of a document stored on a remote server, other portions of the document that contain the structural information and properties used by the selected portion must also typically be transmitted to the mobile communication device. The required downloading of these other portions occurs over a potentially bandwidth-constrained wireless network. For example, if a user wishes to view only a single paragraph in a section at the middle of a 400-page document, the entire section (and sometimes even entire document) that contains default properties for the paragraph must be transmitted to the mobile communication device.
Once downloaded to the device, the electronic document is viewed using a user interface on the mobile communication device, which typically differs from the user interface used to create and view a document on a personal computer. For example, whereas the user interface on a personal computer may include a large, color display and a pointing device such as a mouse, the mobile communication device typically has only a small, possibly non-color, screen, and may not have a mouse. In addition, the mobile communication device typically has greater processing power and memory limitations than a personal computer.